FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Socialization
[Rod Dreher 03/16 04:30 PM]From Crunchy Cons: The biggest question – and it’s usually in the form of a complaint – homeschooling parents are most frequently hit with is “How will your kids be socialized?” What the person asking that usually means is “Aren’t you going to turn them into anti-social nerds?”
To which the screamingly obvious response is, look at the values predominating in youth culture today; is that really working for us?
Julie and I don’t have much use for many of the moral values of the mainstream, and don’t want our boys to be socialized by them. It’s not just about sex. We recoil from the moneyed, media-savvy, techno-driven, status-mad cult of cool that reigns today. We don’t want our kids to be in a school where they’ll pay a price for being a nonconformist. We want them to learn in an atmosphere informed by our religious, mroal, and philosophical values.
Research has shown that by the time a kid hits his early teen years, his peers exert far more influence on his choices than do his parents. What does that mean? For one, it means that kids in today’s schools are surrounded by a materialistic and hypercompetitive value system that exalts money, looks, and athletic achievement above all. School has no doubt always been that way, but as our society has become more affluent and increasingly unmoored from traditional values, the stakes for kids have grown higher.Elsewhere in the book, homeschooler Julia Attaway says: "In homeschooling our kids, we’re not looking to create an artificial environment, but a natural one, where our kids can be kids for as long as they need to be. It’s hard enough for an adult, mature in faith and with a coherent moral and political philosophy, to withstand the barrage of sexuality and materials she encounters every day. How can we begin to hope that our children can sift through that on their own and come out unscathed?” And Donna Steichen says:"Real socialization – that is, learning to get along with other people – doesn’t have to happen in a herd of peers. Parents are other people, too, and so are brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, the mailman, the doctor, the dentist, the librarian, and all the many others a child meets in the normal course of life. Learning to get along with them, peacefully and courteously, is the best kind of socialization, the kind kids will need for the rest of their lives.” Of course, the poor little homeschooled creatures will miss the prom. Oh, the humanity.
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